


Cracks in the Ceiling

by coconutcluster



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, Roman/Patton/Remus/Deceit are mentioned, platonic or romantic analogical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22038649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coconutcluster/pseuds/coconutcluster
Summary: Virgil really felt like ceilings weren’t supposed to have this many cracks.He’d counted twenty-three cracks at this point, twenty-three individual, spidering fissures in the bumpy plaster of his ceiling. Surely that couldn’t be structurally sound. Would his ceiling cave in soon? Who knew what pressure it would take to make twenty-three (or more) cracks into one all-encompassing crack, a spider web of failing plaster and imminent doom, just waiting to crush him where he lay right then?His eyes flickered to the right and caught a spindly mark on the ceiling, right near the wall.Twenty-four cracks. Well, now he felt so much better.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Logic | Logan Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders/Logic | Logan Sanders
Comments: 9
Kudos: 194





	Cracks in the Ceiling

Virgil really felt like ceilings weren’t supposed to have this many cracks. 

He’d counted twenty-three cracks at this point, twenty-three individual, spidering fissures in the bumpy plaster of his ceiling, and he could only see the portion of his ceiling directly above his bed. He couldn’t imagine how many more cracks there were outside his field of vision. Surely twenty-three cracks - or whatever undetermined number there actually was - couldn’t be structurally sound. Would his ceiling cave in soon? Who knew what pressure it would take to make twenty-three (or more) cracks into one all-encompassing crack, a spider web of failing plaster and imminent doom, just waiting to crush him where he lay right then? 

His eyes flickered to the right and caught a spindly mark on the ceiling, right near the wall. 

Twenty-four cracks. Well, now he felt so much better.

With a heaving sigh that only made his throat hurt a little, Virgil squeezed his eyes shut and purged his thoughts of numbers and fissures and spider webs in plaster. Or he tried, anyway. He mostly just succeeded in imagining spiders seeping through the ceiling, bleeding through and painting his room black with millions of tiny, eight-legged bodies. Marginally better. (At least when he opened his eyes, he could verify that his room was not, in fact, covered in spiders. He could not say the cracks or their place in his mind had been similarly debunked.) 

There weren’t any windows in his room, or clocks - at least none that worked right - so the time of day, or how long he’d been in the same spot on his bed, was a mystery to him. He was vaguely hungry, but everything in him was weird and empty and annoying at the moment, so hunger got ignored with the rest of the emptiness. Besides, if he ate, he’d have to face the fact that something else in him was hungry, and no amount of granola or day-old pizza would satiate that appetite, and honestly, he didn’t have _near_ enough existential tolerance to face that kinda thing right now. 

So he just stayed in bed. He’d kicked his blankets aside because he hadn’t straightened them out in weeks, and he laid down, sprawled out like a seasonally depressed starfish, counting cracks in his ceiling and keeping a half-lidded watch for spiders in their depths. 

He couldn’t tell if he was going crazy or if the crazy was just finally reaching surface. Didn’t make a difference, he guessed. At least Remus might be easier to talk to if he was deranged, too. 

A knock at his door yanked him out of a halfhearted guess at what conversation with Remus would be like without a dredge of sanity left on either end. “S’unlocked,” he called, watching the cracks more closely to see if his voice was enough to aggravate them. 

The door creaked open, slow enough that he knew immediately it wasn’t Roman (who almost broke his door down last week when he came to show Virgil a tumblr post), and the courteous moment of silence right after the creaking stopped told him it wasn’t Patton, either; Remus or Deceit wouldn’t even bother to knock.

“Hey, L,” he said to the ceiling. The door creaked for a second more as Logan let himself in a few steps further, and Virgil took the extra moment of silence as the logical Side nodding a greeting that he didn’t need to look at to see. He did look over a second later, though, if only to prove to himself that he hadn’t descended into rigor mortis in the last hour or two. “What’s goin’ on?” 

Logan glanced around the room, as he always did - Virgil never knew what he was looking for, but whatever it was, he either found it or resigned himself to not finding it pretty quickly - and then to Virgil, eyebrows barely raised in a politely attentive way that Logan seemed to have mastered at this point. 

“You didn’t come down for dinner,” the logical Side said simply, “so I came to make sure you’re alright.”

“Yeah, I’ve been snacking through the day, so I’m not too hungry,” Virgil lied, and turned his eyes back to the ceiling. The door didn’t creak open again - he could just see Logan looking up, too, trying to see what exactly had caught his attention. “Is it safe for a ceiling to have a lot of cracks?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Logan glance back to him and step fully into the room before looking back up at the ceiling. “Well, it’s certainly not irreparable.” He put his hands on his hips, squinting at the cracks, the gears in his head obviously whirring. Thomas didn’t seem to have much knowledge about home repair, so Virgil couldn’t imagine how Logan would - then again, Logan usually knew way more than any of them combined regardless of what Thomas retained. “It appears there’s too much drywall compound applied to your ceiling, so it’s harmless beyond aesthetic disrepair.” 

“Oh.” 

“If they’re bothering you, though, I’m sure Roman can conceal them.”

“Yeah.” Virgil traced one of the cracks with his eyes, studying the way the dim light of his lamp cast shadows past the peeling plaster. He wanted to reach up and push the drooping pieces back into place. “But would concealing them _fix_ them? Or would it just, like, cover them up, but they’d still be there underneath?”

“...I’m not following.” 

“The cracks are still there if we just conceal them. It doesn’t matter that no one can see them, because they’re still there. They still exist, and they’ll get bigger and there’ll be more of them over time because that’s what cracks do, even when no one sees them.” 

Logan went silent. Virgil could just hear Roman and Patton talking downstairs, cut off by a distant crash that sounded like Remus at play, even more-so when Roman’s exasperated groan drifted through the house. Were there cracks on the ceiling downstairs, too? Maybe not, but maybe there used to be, but someone - Roman, probably - fixed them. Or maybe he just covered them up. Maybe.

Finally, slowly, Logan asked, “Are you actually talking about the ceiling?”

Attention abruptly torn from the commotion downstairs, Virgil turned his head again to blink at Logan. The logical Side just blinked back, clearly expecting an answer instead of Virgil’s confusion. “What?” 

“Patton recently informed me that, in occasional instances, people project their worries onto other things. Like metaphors,” he clarified, although Virgil felt like it was more of a reminder to himself than the anxious Side. Especially since Virgil didn’t think that was like metaphors at all. “I was just wondering if this is one of those instances.” 

“No, I...” Virgil’s gaze flickered back to the ceiling, and he paused. 

Dang it. 

“I guess,” he admitted. His voice suddenly sounded wrong, like his throat was raw- or the exact opposite, like it hadn’t been used properly in years. A blaze of pain burned in his hands as he dug his fingernails into his palms. “I think so, but I don’t... I don’t know what’s wrong, then. Actually wrong, I mean.”

“Well,” Logan started, glancing around the room again, “has there been anything troubling you lately?” 

“...Logan. Buddy. You know who you’re talking to, right?”

Logan gave a small smile, more familiar than exasperated or annoyed. (Despite the wrongness bubbling up inside him, it made Virgil’s mouth tug at a smile, too, to be regarded with something familiar. It felt nice to be known sometimes.) “Right, my apologies. I mean anything specific, or something that stands out more than the, ah... general, day-to-day worries.”

Something specific, something outstanding... Virgil took a deep breath and stared into the cracks across the ceiling, searching their details for answers, his fingertips drumming against his mattress as he picked through the mess of thoughts scribbled in his head. 

There was one crack right above him. It was thin and spindly, but he could see where it was worst, right in the center, where plaster peeled back from the ceiling, yellowed with age and crumbling at its edges. Virgil rubbed his fingertips together, imagining what would happen if he pulled at the pieces - would they break off, like dead leaves disintegrating off their stems, or would he pull and pull and pull and uncover the foundation beneath the cracks? Layer over layer to conceal one thing after another, but if he pulled, it would all come back to light. It would all still be there; it was all still there. 

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he breathed at last. 

He didn’t know just how long he’d been staring at his ceiling, but Logan had come to sit neatly on the side of his bed, hands folded in his lap as he waited for Virgil to figure himself out. With the anxious Side’s comment, he just raised an eyebrow. “Why is that?”

“I’m not one of you guys,” said Virgil, curling his nails into his palms again. “It doesn’t matter if Thomas accepts me, or if I change my outfit, or whatever. I’m not a Light Side just because I have a new hoodie and new friends.” The cracks in the ceiling could be covered up all day, but they would still be cracks. “I’m still something bad, no matter what I put on top. I’m still Anxiety. It’s only a matter of time before the bad side of me is all I am again.” 

Logan sat silently on the edge of his bed as Virgil spoke, his eyes narrowed and brows knit, just a little. When Virgil finished - his chest felt weird, that emptiness still gnawing away at him, but gentler, somehow horribly acknowledged but alleviated at the same time - the logical Side just took in a breath and looked down at Virgil’s carpet, littered with wrappers and clothes. The silence seemed drawn out as Virgil waited, filling him with more dread every second it continued. Had he overstepped a line? Did he ramble too long? Was-

“Did you know,” Logan started quietly, glancing over at Virgil with some mixture of reassurance and genuine curiosity clear on his face, “that every cell in the human body replaces itself after seven years?” 

Virgil stared at him. “Oh.” 

The room went quiet again; Virgil felt like he was supposed to say something else, maybe in revelation as Logan’s fun fact explained just what he needed it to, but he was at a loss. The curiosity disappeared from Logan’s face a moment later as he noticed the anxious Side’s uncertainty. He shook his head, more to himself than Virgil, pressing his lips together tightly and turning his eyes back to the carpet, like he needed something unobstructive to look at while he collected his thoughts. It explained a lot about his blank bedroom walls, Virgil supposed. 

“What I mean,” the logical Side tried again, “is that people are dynamic. If you exist, then everything about you, from minute details down to the very fundamentals of your existence, is constantly evolving. Does that make more sense?”

“Well... yeah, but-” Virgil sucked in a breath, letting his head fall back onto his pillow so he could stare at the ceiling again. “But people still have pieces of their old selves, don’t they? We don’t lose _everything_ , right?” 

Logan hummed in response. “Of course we don’t, but perhaps the pieces we hold onto are the pieces worth having.

“Human beings are testaments to reinvention, Virgil,” he continued, leaning back onto his palms, carefully avoiding Virgil’s legs but nudging his ankle to prompt the anxious Side to look at him. “We all have parts of our past that we’re not quite proud of, but our evolutionary purpose has always been to improve over time; the fact that you recognize your old flaws sets you up all the more for growth, doesn’t it?” 

Virgil stared at him again. Logan waited, patient as ever, his face genial with a small smile - all of his smiles seemed small, almost subdued, but there was still something grounding at the thought of Logic being happy. 

“I guess so,” Virgil agreed, feeling a small smile of his own come on. “I guess you’re right.” 

Logan brightened. “I usually am.”

“Okay, Sherlock, no need to get cocky,” Virgil grinned, grabbing a pillow from under his head to toss at the logical Side, who gave a short laugh as he barely managed to block the projectile cushion. “You’ll sound like Roman.”

“Oh, God forbid.” 

They fell silent again, comfortable now, a trademark of his and Logan’s friendship that Virgil more than appreciated. Part of him wanted to lay back down and just let the quiet carry on to ease his mind, but the way Logan idly stared up at the ceiling gave him the feeling that the logical Side had other things to be doing. Maybe another day. 

“Thanks, Lo,” he said to break the silence, an unofficial goodbye. Logan looked over at him and smiled again in response.

“Of course,” the logical Side said breezily, standing with a sigh and one last glance around the room. Virgil thought he would just leave, but before he took another step toward the door, he glanced back down at the anxious Side, raising an eyebrow. “You should probably come eat an actual dinner.” 

“That... might be a good idea, yeah.” 

With a heaving sigh, he pulled himself out of bed at last and stood - his joints were stiff, and his palms still burned with half-moons left by his bitten fingernails, but the weird feeling in his chest, the unidentified hunger, felt smaller, like maybe it’d been satiated for now. (The actual hunger in his stomach was not nearly as kind and he immediately decided to not skip dinner again.) 

Logan waited for him by the door, hands folded behind his back. Neither of them mentioned the ceiling cracks as they made their way downstairs, even though Virgil glanced up more than once; maybe, he thought as he saw one of the spindly marks above the couch, maybe they weren’t all that foreboding. They added something... recognizable. Something familiar. 

Logan went on idly about a scientist as Virgil waved a small greeting to Patton and Roman in the living room - Darwin and tortoises, awakening some middle school science lesson that Virgil couldn’t fully recall - and though Virgil didn’t fully tune in to the details of what the logical Side said, or what Roman and Patton were playing on the TV, there was a pleasant lull to the noises as they melded together in his ears. He felt like he just melted into the scene with ease, purple fitting nicely between red and blue. His old hoodie would never have blended like that. The old _him_ wouldn’t have blended like that. 

But he was still wearing black, wasn’t he? He was still quiet, still sharp, still him at his core. _He_ was recognizable. Familiar. But he was better, too - he hadn’t been covered up, he’d just grown. Maybe he could keep growing.

There were twenty-four cracks in the ceiling above his bed, and Virgil would let them stay as they were. 


End file.
